It’s Getting Hot In Here: There Must Not Be a President on the Ballot

As Democrat Al Gore ran for the U.S. presidency in 2000, the earth’s temperature hovered around 15.9 degrees Celsius. A year later, after Gore faced his inconvenient truth that Texas Gov. George W. Bush beat him, the temperature jumped 0.1 degrees Celsius, then kept rising until the next presidential election year.

The year 2000 — like 1992 and 1996 before it, and like 2004 and 2008 after it — was striking for another reason. Not only was it a the year of a presidential election for U.S. voters, but the average global temperature was notably cooler than any immediately surrounding years, preceding it or following it.

The pattern piqued the interest of OpenSecrets Blog. Could it really be that running for president in some way, somehow, causes global cooling?

It seems counterintuitive, since during presidential elections, we typically think of candidates spouting hot air — and criss-crossing the country with greenhouse gas-emitting jets and buses.

“The thing about carbon dioxide is that it’s a global greenhouse gas,” Deke Arndt, chief of the climate monitoring branch of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., told OpenSecrets Blog. “If we’re squirting out extra carbon dioxide in short-term pulses, that’s going to be in the system for a long time.”

Arndt continued, “I can’t think of a way that short-term activity would cause global temperatures to be depressed.”

So how has every presidential election year for the past two decades been cooler than the years immediately preceding and following them?

“I’m not aware of any science that has addressed that,” Arndt said, adding that it’s “a little weird” to see a downward dip every presidential election year, like clockwork.

That’s not to say that Arndt was without ideas for possible explanations.

What makes this climate data conundrum tick? His first suggestion was La Niña, a cyclical weather phenomenon. He also cited the 1991 volcanic eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines, which caused lower-than-average global temperatures during 1992 and 1993.

Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., and one of the world’s leading climate change scientists, shattered our hypothesis that American politicians were just spewing a bunch of cool air.

Trenberth maintained that existing weather phenomenon were likely responsible for this every-four-years coincidence.

“Typically during La Niña there’s a cooling, a lowering of temperatures,” Trenberth said. “It’s not quite like clockwork, but it’s quasi-periodic.

“The average is every three to seven years,” he continued. “But if I had to give a single number I would say four.”

Or could something more sinister be at play? Could it be that presidential campaigns somehow cause a mini-global cooling?

“I don’t think so, but who knows?” Trenberth said after a hearty laugh. “That’s a correlation but not necessarily causal.”

According to a recent report from NOAA, the planet’s average surface temperature for June was the warmest on record at 16.2 C (61.1 F). This is 0.68 C (1.22 F) above the 20th century average of 15.5 C (59.9 F).

The report goes on to note that June was the 304th consecutive month above the 20th century average — meaning the planet’s annual temperature hasn’t been below the 20th century average since sometime between President Ronald Reagan’s second inauguration and the launch of New Coke.

During the past 20 years, the global annual mean temperature has increased at a rate of about 2 percent, a total of about 0.33 C (or 0.59 F) since 1989.

If that increase seems small, maybe you should recall some advice from Gore’s victor, President George W. Bush: some things should not be misunderestimated.

“It’s quite a small number on a global basis,” warned Trenberth. “But regionally, it’s a whole lot more.”

According to Trenberth, temperatures changes over land might be magnified by a factor of two or three compared to the global mean, and changes in the Arctic can be five-to-10 times more pronounced than the global average.

The affects of global warming, he said, have “profound influences around the world” and “very important regional implications.” The global mean temperature, Trenberth added, can be likened to “the canary in the coal mine.”

This climb in temperature has certainly not been uniform. Nor do scientists expect it to be.

On a year-to-year basis, the earth’s temperature will fluctuate because of a wide variety of processes such as volcanic eruptions and El Niño and La Niña, the ocean-atmosphere phenomena that, respectively, significantly warm and cool temperatures in the Pacific.

“There will be noise in the system,” said Arndt of NOAA’s climate monitoring branch. “There will be years that are off-trend. That’s natural.”

NOAA is the federal government agency tasked with monitoring the conditions of the globe’s oceans, atmosphere, weather and climate. Regardless of whether a Democrat or a Republican is in the White House, its officials manage the nation’s fisheries, issue storm warnings and track the effects of global warming.

As the country gears up for its next presidential election year, in 2012, NOAA scientists undoubtedly will be following more than just the horse races — the horse race of which politician is leading in the polls and the horse race of whether the year is going to be the warmest one on record.

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